Conspiracy Fueled Idiots Descend On Futel
High Anxiety But No Casualties in Online Swarm Of Vapidity
1. Willamette Valley Dream Survey
2015
While riding my bicycle home from work in Portland’s SE Industrial District, I see a Willamette Valley Dream Survey flyer stuck to an overpass. The flyer invites the reader to call a local number and describe their dreams:
Have you been having strange dreams?
The Willamette Valley Dream Survey is investigating a recent spike in bizarre, unexplainable dreams. If you have been experiencing any unusual dream activity, you can help by reporting a summary.
This is everything known to myself or any other Futel worker about the Willamette Valley Dream Survey. This article does not contain any further information about them, and none of the characters we will discuss have been able to learn anything about them, or even make plausible theories.
I am of course an immediate fan of the project, because it is based on voicemail, has low complexity to set up but many imaginative possibilities, and run by mysterious protagonists who don’t ruin it by talking. I add the number to the Futel directory.
This is the complete relationship between the Willamette Valley Dream Survey and Futel. None of the other characters in this article will claim to have any interaction with the Willamette Valley Dream Survey other than making unimaginative calls to their number.
2. Reddit
May - August 2020
Reddit posts about the Happy Valley Dream Survey start to appear in a mystery solving group. The Happy Valley Dream Survey is apparently a copycat project in Utah. Or maybe someone just printed out a fake flyer and photographed it, who knows.
This Reddit group is focused on armchair research of conspiracy theories. Most participants attempt, or at least pretend, to explain mysteries like crimes or strange phenomena, but of course there are a lot of goofs just spinning tall tales and having fun.
Mixed in are the ARG, for Alternate Reality Game, players. ARGs are puzzles which interact with the real world, where clues can be found in physical locations or delivered via media like web pages, email, phone calls, and text messages. ARGs are often part of marketing campaigns, and an early instance promoted the 2001 movie Artificial Intelligence, but many are made for fun by amateurs. Some are not organized or set up in advance, but unfold as participants craft explanations and links between real life events and previously shared clues. A collaborative story is created with players trying to get their story line elements accepted by having other players build their own elements on them.
The Reddit group tries to find or invent an explanation for the Happy Valley Dream Survey. They get it backwards and claim that the Willamette Valley Dream Survey is a copy, or perhaps a branch. Someone eventually takes the time to look up the name and finds a newspaper article about Futel which describes finding the Willamette Valley Dream Survey directory entry. Commenters decide that Futel is run by one of the surveys, with a minority proposing other hierarchies. The motivation for this is conjectured to be a scam of some kind, harvesting phone numbers, behavioral data, or psychic energy.
The story quickly gets embellished by an echo chamber effect. After a report of receiving a weird text message after calling Futel, other posts refer to those comments, magnifying them in the retelling, describing several cases of menacing calls and threatening messages. Users delete their accounts after posting, which causes a stir and amplifies their ideas. The top theories now involve cult recruitment. The ARG players try to figure out what the clues are and where they lead.
In mid-May, a link between Futel and a collaborative story called “September 5” is accepted as likely based on the strained translation of a gibberish text message. “September 5” is referred to as an ARG, but it’s more of an apocalyptic prediction which some people pretend is believed by others. Reddit users make weird posts about it and try to get them repeated. There’s no real structure behind it other than the world ending on September 5, but that’s enough to to make a post spookier by referring to the “September 5 group”
A few more posters with advanced research skills are able to Google us. This allows them to find our web page and the conference videos that describe how and why we run Futel. A handful of Reddit posts point out that our reasons are plainly revealed, and that it doesn’t seem necessary to tack a sinister occult organization on to that. These are not exciting enough to get attention, and don’t advance the story.
Futel starts receiving email about all this in early May. Some ask straightforward questions about why we list the dream survey in our directory. I answer them, and a few thank me and report back fairly accurately to their Reddit groups. They are followed by people with vague questions or asking to arrange a phone call without explaining why.
At this point I become concerned about qanon pizzagate situations, and stop responding to messages. This is annoying because some of the people writing are apparently genuinely curious, including telecom geeks and phreaks, with whom it is always fun to talk. And I appreciate conspiracy theorists and have followed a lot of zines, cable access and radio shows, and newsgroups from which these internet forum dwellers descend. Not to mention the conversations and voicemails with some neuroatypical Futel participants. It’s annoying to have to ignore the sincere people.
3. First YouTuber
June 2020
The story escapes Reddit with YouTube video by “Floating Head Guy”. This video isn’t so bad, mainly because he just summarizes what other people are repeating and knows what state Futel is based in, but the comments immediately plummet to the basic conspiracy theory of the right wing thrall: occult child sex trafficking cabals. Futel spans the continent and is clearly targeting low income neighborhoods for recruitment! One poster replaces their comment with “Moving to a more secure channel. They are watching”, a now familiar way of attempting to get attention for later posts without having any actual content to share.
Someone finds another project that shares members with Futel, and asks what the connection is between the two. The next commenter says they heard it was linked to trafficking. In reality, nobody has heard of it.
4. Successful YouTuber
June - July 2020
In early June, Futel gets a familiar salvo of emails, Twitter comments, and other messages from someone who has a “quick question”. I notice him when he takes the new tack of using a Patreon subscription message. This is a good angle and I decide to respond if his subscription survives until the end of the month, when he will actually be charged the five bucks, but he cancels before that happens.
In late July, he is revealed to be a YouTuber when he releases a 40 minute video on Futel and the dream surveys. I have a grudging respect for him because he at least sees an opportunity and puts in the effort. While herding internet mouth breathers is a stupid way to try and make money, it must be recognized that when a niche exists, it will get filled. Congratulations, “successful YouTuber”, you got paid to churn out content loosely based on our work.
The video is padded with filler, including stock Portland sunsets and long stretches of him reading our essays while scrolling through our blog and pausing on photographs of Futel volunteers. Like the content we have already seen, it is uncreative and mainly regurgitates earlier Reddit posts, calling it research. In one scene he shows his web browser window as he types into the search bar, and the autocompletion suggestions scroll by, all ending with “reddit”.
Regardless, this is best executed media of the pile. This guy knows how to lay down narration over footage of him typing into a desktop computer. The highlight is an action scene where he videos himself buying a burner phone at Walmart to protect himself from the harmful effects of calling the numbers. His knees shake, he’s pumped! But, dude, did you bring it home? Did you and your bros turn off of your phones during your shopping trip? You need at least seven proxies!
The gist of the video is that he just doesn’t get it. He gets so close! Is Futel an art project? Is it a public service? There must be more! Why would anyone go to all of this trouble? He can’t confess to entertaining a simple explanation because that won’t drive viewership.
For some reason, he mispronounces Futel as “F’tel” and Willamette as “WILL-ah-met”. This is hard to understand because he plays Futel and Willamette Valley Dream Survey recordings in his video which pronounce them correctly. Does he watch his own content? All of the subsequent videographers and podcasters will copy this pronounciation.
This video sets off the most annoying wave of commenters yet. Messages arrive on LinkedIn and GitHub. Operators start getting calls about it, but at least that method attracts people with a sense of curiosity. The YouTuber himself doesn’t follow up, despite his ominous warnings of a deeper nefarious truth behind it. He realizes that he’s already achieved peak engagement for the subject. Posts from his fans demanding that we answer his questions continue to trickle in, but without a community to fuel them, they aren’t as threatening.
5. Interlude
Why are we seeing this?
Now that we’ve encountered the first wave of YouTubers and their final boss, we may be able to understand what these people want.
The “successful YouTuber” doesn’t really care to learn anything. He just wants to let his viewers think that they are exploring a mystery. He’s found subjects and positioning for his videos that will earn him fractions of a cent for each ad impression. To optimize viewership, they can’t involve actual research, because that is boring. His users need to feel like they are intelligent and have knowledge which the masses aren’t seeking out, but they must consume it passively. If they have to actually work, for example by applying reason, they won’t feel successful anymore, because it will be difficult, and they will quit. Those who can perform basic web searches, follow documents of more than one paragraph, and organize their ideas into logical conclusions will soon see that the exciting explanation is overwhelmingly unlikely.
The other YouTubers, Redditors, and various commenters want the same thing, they’re just not as successful. They don’t want to find anything, they want to keep looking. If they’re only doing the basic minimum of repeating conjectures, they can convince themselves that there’s something there and that they are doing important work. Because of this, the community tends to select paranoiacs, apopheniacs, and other delusional people.
We did not expect this kind of attention because Futel is a very open organization. Our implementation notes, processes, budgets, grant proposals, and code are publicly accessible. We link directly to these repositories on our website, where we invite collaborators. So many of these questions could be answered in two clicks!
An unfortunate quirk of this group is their susceptibility to being lead by the nose with a technique familiar to viewers of right wing news media, known as JAQing off, for Just Asking Questions. Is there any truth to the rumors about Futel’s link with sex trafficking? Why are Futel phones found in low income neighborhoods? Is it because people there are susceptible to cult recruitment? What horrible fates occur to those who call these phone numbers?
It would be so easy to grief these people. We could divert them with sock puppets. We could set up fake backdated blogs. We could provide keys to extracting secret messages from mainstream newspaper articles that said what we wanted them to say. It is tempting to lead them along to get them off our backs, or at least burn the story out faster. But we don’t want to hurt the people who are genuinely delusional, or inadvertently trigger some random violent reaction on an innocent bystander.
6. Candles
August 2020
The next rung in the descent begins with “Candles”. We saw him earlier when he was “moving to a more secure channel”, which turned out to be his YouTube channel. Candles saw the fortunes available to successful YouTube slingers and decided to start his new career with a “deep dive” into the dream surveys and Futel’s evil machinations.
All of “Candles” ideas, and his pronunciations of Futel and Willamette, are from the “successful YouTuber’s” video. but he does have perseverance, eventually visiting a Futel phone in Detroit and buying all of our mail-order literature (thanks for your support!). He also has a flair for storytelling, inventing a police escort which accompanies him to the phone and drives off several shady Lincoln Town Cars with tinted windows which are later seen prowling his neighborhood. He also claims that his phone acts strangely after calling the numbers, and that he receives threatening calls and emails from Futel in response to his discoveries.
His main schtick is to find weird corners of the phone menus, embellish them, and suggest links between them and other exaggerated reports mentioned on Reddit. Like everyone else, he doesn’t have any evidence for his conclusions and can only trail off about how he just can’t believe an explanation that doesn’t involve weird cults. Why would someone go to all this effort? There must be a reason!
“Candles” is not as worrisome because he doesn’t have much of an audience and is clearly not good at what he does, but his followers are kind of sad. In one of his several “going dark” moods, he announces that Reddit is not secure enough, and herds his crew into Facebook and Discord groups with open membership.
One ARG guy is smart enough seek clues not providedd by “Candles”, and visits our IRC channel. He actually tells us what he is looking for and is able to ask questions and read responses, so he quickly learns that there are no real ARG hints on the phones, and that it’s shockingly easy to find a story that makes much more sense than a mind control cult. He checks back in with the Discord group and says that there doesn’t seem to be anything to pursue. “It’s nothing different than those die hard D&D kids we all knew.” Since nobody has anything to refute this, there’s nothing interesting for him, so he leaves. “Candles” is annoyed by this and says that he’s being watched and has to go dark for a while. After a few days of rudderless discussion, everyone with even rudimentary critical thinking skills has left. It’s “Candles”, some trolls, and a few delusional people. One person only posts over and over about how it’s all coming together and he can almost see it.
“Candles” makes a short followup video about Futel, and then desperately tries to keep his career going with videos about subjects needing his investigation skills, like the Mothman. He still occasionally makes exploratory posts with fabricated stories about threats he has received from Futel, usually followed by another “going dark” period when he doesn’t like the response.
He makes an appearance on a podcast hosted by a pair of cringe frat boys, talking about his ongoing investigation and the bombshells he is about to reveal, and continuing the tradition of mispronouncing Futel and Willamette despite playing several clips which say them correctly. During the interview he plays a recording of his operator call (thanks, asshole), which I fielded without knowing who he was, and calls me an asshole for not explaining enough to him (thanks, asshole). He and his hosts whine about how spooky and unfriendly we are and how suspicious I am in particular, and then they let “Candles” talk about the hard won information he is about to drop until they have enough banter to fill an episode.
This is the most disenheartening part of the stupid saga for me. “Candles” is sharing my name and photo while making vague accusations. His moronic followers are calling me a sex criminal. I start to question my own wisdom. These feelings are familiar when working hard on a quixotic project, but with Futel I get occasional lifts from messages from strangers about how the phone have helped them. Now I’m just getting abuse. My neighborhood barista asks me if there’s anything to the Reddit “rabbit hole”. I stomp out and find a new place to get coffee.
I spend an evening in my basement salvaging payphone parts, which is calming. These stupid people will never understand what it feels like to be creative and listen to others. Against my better judgement I exchange some friendly emails with a graveyard shift circuit etcher who writes about his dream communication and the phreaker history he’s reading, which helps my morale. Fuck these trolls, I know what my motivations are, and I’m not going to let them get me down just because they can’t fit me in their worldview.
7, Various podcasts
August - October 2020
That last podcast is bothersome because “Candles” is clearly grasping at whatever he can to keep the story alive. He workshops a lot of his personal attacks against me in his double secret Discord group, but this is the first time they are published. Luckily, we are now seeing the decline of Futel as a worthwhile vehicle for cranking out content which can attract enough attention to be monetized. At this stage, it’s all podcasts full of ads for podcast advertising networks.
The first set of these recycles talking points from the initial Reddit and YouTube content, just as we’ve seen on YouTube. The second set recycles the first. Thankfully, the segments covering Futel and the dream surveys get smaller and smaller with each pass. Eventually the Futel content is just a quick piece in a list of short creepypasta summaries. One of the later ones is put on YouTube with video, a pair of teenagers sitting at their desks talking into webcams. It’s a nice way to end the story, we hope. Go kids! Talk about weird stuff on YouTube, practice for better things!
8. Conclusion
This parade has hopefully run its course among all but the dregs and random comment threads. To anyone who comes across us while looking for spooky stories, welcome, find our phones, call your mom. To those who are trying to scrape up money or fame from this, sorry, it’s a stupid way to try and grow your personal brand. Avoid live weaponized memes! There’s a cultural cold war going on around you, a real war, the kind with ordinary people getting killed. The only way to win is not to play. The life of an unwitting soldier is not a happy one!